Is Gatsby Black? Misreading and Miscoloring Texts

When my memoir was published in May, 2013, I thought Leo DiCaprio was going to sell it for me. He was starring in the third movie version of Great Gatsby, and my memoir featured an unusual interpretation of the novel that had entertained my students for years. While DiCaprio sold Fitzgerald's novel, moving it to the top of several bestsellers lists, he didn't help my book because only English majors care about my theory that Fitzgerald was revising James W. Johnson's classic African-American novel. As I was reading some of the commentary surrounding the movie, however, I discovered that another English professor's unusual interpretation had made its way into the culture. The commentator pointed out that some people now believe that Gatsby is black. During the late nineties, I had heard about an English professor from New York making the then ridiculed case that Gatsby is a black man passing for white. He probably cited some of the same textual evidence that I used to make my case--Gatsby's medal was from Montenegro, racist Tom said that Gatsby must have gone in the back door in Kentucky when he met Daisy, and when Tom said that allowing Mr. Nobody from Nowhere to make love to one's wife will lead to race mixing, Jordan said, "we're all white here." I'm sure this professor also noticed that Gatsby's hair color and eyes were never described, and that his skin was tan. But I wonder what he did with the passage that I cite to prove that Fitzgerald was saying that a black man, no matter how fair-skinned and successful, could not pass for white. The passage appears right after Daisy accidentally killed Myrtle while driving Gatsby's car. The man who saw Gatsby's yellow car is described as a "pale, well-dressed Negro." How often is a black man described as pale? And if the black man was pale, how did Nick know that he was black? Clearly, if the observant Nick could recognize that well-dressed, pale man as black, he would know that Gatsby was black.

Classic texts like Great Gatsby are fun to teach because they leave room for multiple interpretations. Black readers like me can notice that a black man is described as pale and that the two times that blacks appear in the novel they are successful and are associated with death. Jewish readers (or readers interested in anti-Semitism in literature) can notice the ugly portrait of Meyer Wolfshiem and discuss what that characterization says about Fitzgerald and his times. Feminists can focus on Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle. Not all interpretations, however, are equal. As I said to some undergraduates who thought Brother Jack in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is black because he is called "brother": "Nope. That's just wrong." Jack is called Brother because that's what members of the Brotherhood, a barely disguised fictional portrait of the Communist Party, called each other. There was overwhelming textual evidence that Jack is white. The evidence that Gatsby is white is not as strong, but there is certainly no strong evidence that he is black. There is plenty of strong evidence, however, that Fitzgerald was deliberately revising Johnson's narrative of a black man successfully passing for white, marrying a rich white woman, and living happily with her until she died in childbirth. I present that evidence in Chapter Nine of A Redlight Woman Who Knows How to Sing the Blues.